Extreme Gradient Boosting with XGBoost

This chapter will introduce you to the fundamental idea behind XGBoost—boosted learners. Once you understand how XGBoost works, you'll apply it to solve a common classification problem found in industry: predicting whether a customer will stop being a customer at some point in the future.

After a brief review of supervised regression, you'll apply XGBoost to the regression task of predicting house prices in Ames, Iowa. You'll learn about the two kinds of base learners that XGboost can use as its weak learners, and review how to evaluate the quality of your regression models.

This chapter will teach you how to make your XGBoost models as performant as possible. You'll learn about the variety of parameters that can be adjusted to alter the behavior of XGBoost and how to tune them efficiently so that you can supercharge the performance of your models.

Take your XGBoost skills to the next level by incorporating your models into two end-to-end machine learning pipelines. You'll learn how to tune the most important XGBoost hyperparameters efficiently within a pipeline, and get an introduction to some more advanced preprocessing techniques.